Jan de Vries

Principal Azure and AI Architect at Zure

About

I'm a passionate engineer, with over 20 years of experience designing and delivering innovative solutions. My regular work centers on building reliable, scalable systems in Microsoft Azure and creating GenAI-powered solutions. I love working in complex environments, collaborating with customers, leadership, and engineering teams to design solutions that provide value on both short- and long-term. I regularly coach engineers and teams, helping both them and myself to grow. Beyond engineering, I'm keen on sharing knowledge. I write blog posts, speak at conferences, user groups, and actively engage with the tech community.

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From a distributed monolith to a microservices solution

Are you creating a microservices solution? You sure about this? Creating small services that invoke other small services, which invoke even more smaller services most of the time results in a distributed monolith. Using commands, events and loosely coupled services is something you SHOULD strive for! I'm happy to show you my lessons learned in this realm and which Azure services you can use to create a very scalable & responsive microservices solution. I'll quickly show you which services you should use, like Azure App Services, Azure Functions, Event Grid, and Storage Queues. With the short introduction out of the way, we'll dive into the details of these services, how to get the most out of them and when to use each service. After this session, you'll be aware of the pitfalls in a service-to-service design and know how to implement a proper, loosely coupled, microservices solution.

Designing software in the cloud

Are you migrating to the cloud, or have you migrated already? Don't forget to update your software design also! Designing and developing software running on-premises often looks different compared to a cloud-native solution. You can do a 1-on-1 migration of your software, and it will run fine*, but by leveraging a couple of standard cloud patterns, you can make the software more robust and cost-effective. I'll show you which steps I often take for migrating software to a cloud environment and which problems arise along the way. After this session, you'll have a clear understanding of what to do for a successful migration.

Building an SDK to improve your API usage

Creating an API is just the first step. Making it easily usable by other teams, including your own, is crucial. Do you want them to struggle with figuring out how to interact with your API and potentially fail? Why not help them by providing a robust SDK? Having worked with numerous backend systems over the past decades, I have experienced firsthand the time, frustration, and effort required to 'get it right.' Often, teams have created unique ways of invoking endpoints, have peculiar payload requirements, or have non-standard authentication requirements. You can simplify the integration process for teams by providing an SDK in multiple programming languages if desired. In this session, I will show you how to create an SDK with minimal effort. The key is to have your Open API specifications ready, and the rest can be automated. And to make it more fun, I will show you how to fine-tune the generated SDK to make it even more developer-friendly. By the end of this session, you will know how to save your clients significant time and effort when they need to interact with your system.

Get a knack for debugging

Debugging isn't just a skill, done right, it's a superpower. Yet somehow, it feels like many engineers are losing their grip on it. Whether it's a production meltdown or a mysterious local glitch, too often I see people poking around in the dark, hoping something sticks. In this session, I'll bring the art of debugging back into the spotlight. After years of working with complex systems both on-premises and in the cloud, I've built up a toolkit, call it a gut instinct, for troubleshooting. It's not magic. it's knowing how services behave under the hood and how protocols tick gives you an edge when things go sideways. I'll cover practical strategies for debugging large systems, spotting patterns, and keeping your architecture resilient. And yes, with copilots and agents churning out more code than ever, your debugging skills are about to become even more valuable. Expect real-world stories, actionable tips, and a few laughs. Let’s help you get that knack for debugging, and maybe even enjoy it.

Migrate your solution to modern standards

Did you lift-and-shift your way into the cloud, or are you running large compute clusters to keep an app running? If so, there’s a good chance you’re burning more money than you need to. Here’s the good news: you can probably optimize your workload and cut costs. Even better? You don’t have to reach for Kubernetes if you don’t want to. In my day job, I come across all kinds of cloud-hosted solutions. Some are beautifully designed & implemented and a joy to work with. Others... not so much. That's not a value judgement, both kinds often drive successful businesses. Still, there’s plenty of room to modernize without rewriting everything from scratch. In this session, I’ll walk you through how to evolve less-than-ideal designs using patterns like the Strangler pattern, CQRS, Gateway Routing, and more. These approaches can help you migrate toward a cleaner, more scalable architecture. I’ll focus on Azure, but the principles apply across the board. Let’s make your solution leaner, smarter, and way more cloud-friendly.

Build a generative AI solution that's delivering value

This is not a session about how great AI or LLMs are or if they are good or not at counting the number of r's in "Strawberry". It's about how I'm leveraging agents and language models in my current project to deliver value for our customers. If there's one thing language models are good at, it's interpreting language and data. Especially if it's structured data with useful descriptions. In that sense, it's much like ourself. In my project, we have a lot of structured, financial, data. We now need to do analysis on the data and make sure calculations are deterministic and always correct. That means I can't rely on the nondeterministic nature of a language model. By combining the Microsoft Agent Framework, Foundry agents, and a mix of .NET and Python components, I’ve built a high‑performing solution we can trust. You'll leave the session knowing how to orchestrate agents and keep control over the accuracy & reliability. All based on my own experience working in the ecosystem.